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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29226357">Stop, It's All Happening Again</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/redfiona/pseuds/redfiona'>redfiona</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire (Kasabian Music Video)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canonical Character Death - Sort Of, Character Death, Dystopia, Gen, Prophetic Dreams</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:21:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,838</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29226357</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/redfiona/pseuds/redfiona</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"What if I told you we all die?"</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Stop, It's All Happening Again</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I've always loved the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agVpq_XXRmU">music video for Fire</a>; how it feels like part of a much larger story, the messing about with timeline, and all the possible explanations of what's going on.  This is what I've always imagined is the bigger story.  The title taken from a completely different Kasabian track, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVTEqG9enEY">Empire</a>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"What if I told you we all die?"  He's wrapped the thin sheet that acts as a blanket for both of them around himself.  The panicked sweat is cooling now and it's cold in this desert town.</p><p>He keeps his voice down, even though they're alone in the room.  The Guitarist always made sure there was some safe, secluded part of wherever they were kipping where they could be alone, mostly because of mornings like this, when he wakes up screaming.  He's always meant to thank the Guitarist, but never got around to it.  He really ought to do it now, while he can, if none of them are going to see the next sunrise.</p><p>That space, his need for solitude sometimes, when it all gets too much, it's caused trouble before now.  Causes like theirs, people drift in and out of loose cells, you stay or you go, split off and set up your own, because you disagree or because you think it will be better that way.  Sometimes, there's a sense that they're fighting with each other as much as they're fighting against the system, but that's okay.  Or it's not, but if they're going to stand for anything, they stand for dissent.  But while people are wandering in and out, some of them wonder why, if they say they're all for liberty, equality, and so on, that he and the Guitarist get their own room, while everyone else is sleeping however many to a room.  Suit saved them one time, <i>it takes two bullets to the back to kill him, taking point so the rest of them can carry Longhair to the getaway van</i>, saying it's because both he and the Guitarist snore and they might as well keep each other awake.  Suit knows about the nightmares, even he doesn't know exactly what they are.  He takes the knowledge in his stride; the way Suit does everything.</p><p>He owes them all so much. If there's a way to stop them all being gunned down tomorrow, he owes them everything to try to find it. He can't ask them to give up their lives when they've all given up so much already for this crusade of theirs - their homes, their hopes, their names. He can't remember the last time he called Suit anything but that, but it never used to be his name, it was never even his nickname, it's just what he’s been called since they became accidental outlaws. Or rather, quite deliberate outlaws, but not because they wanted to be, not because they enjoy it, but because there’s no version of this world where he or any of the others would have done anything differently when it all started happening</p><p>The nicknames come from the media, from when they started being noticed as "the Music Bandits", and the press had nothing to go off but physical descriptions when they tried to identify them.  Longhair thinks his nickname is particularly hilarious given what they all look like now, three of them with hair below their shoulders, but it is what it is.  He's called Prophet in the papers; they say he leads a cult.  If anyone said that in their presence, Note and Longhair laughed like drains, and the Guitarist smirked.  He doesn't think that Longhair has ever listened to him, and he's known him for twenty years at least.  Note, he's not known as long, but she takes nothing from no-one, least of all him <i>she never stood a chance, because you can't drive and play guitar so she's unarmed as she sits in the van, ready to speed them away from the bank.  It's her death that makes him angriest.  She should have had the chance to go out in a blaze of glory</i>.  The Guitarist would smirk, because he calls Prophet that because he knows Prophet dreams visions of the future.  Everyone else is happy to write off Prophet's occasionally uncanny knowledge as luck, but after Prophet knew the way out of a maze of a security building they'd been trapped in, the Guitarist wasn't willing to believe that any more.</p><p>"It's not luck.  I know luck.  What you've got is something else."  There's a party, an actual party, with singing and dancing, music everywhere, once they've made good their escape and the only two people not enjoying it are the Guitarist and himself, because the Guitarist wants to know.</p><p>"You'll think I'm mad."</p><p>"We're on the FBI's most wanted list because we break into banks to try to save music.  The world's already gone mad, why not join it?"</p><p>"I see the future in my dreams."  It feels terrible and stupid to say it out loud.</p><p>The Guitarist's response lifts some of the load. "Like our future, or the future in general?" There's not a moment of doubt that Prophet does indeed have visions, and that they’re not delusions or anything like that. The Guitarist just wants details of how it all works. Sometimes that faith, which has never wavered, is all that keeps Prophet going, which is probably dangerous, for everyone. It's like Note and her tattoo, the one the media used to give her her nickname. She said it was a promise, that someday, they'd win and having it wouldn't be an automatic conviction. They're all hoping for the same something, doing this to reach it, and grabbing whatever they can to sustain themselves.</p><p>"I wish it was that clear.  I see things," even asleep, Prophet knows the difference between his dreams and the visions, "and they're real, and they're going to happen, but it’s not always obvious what they are, they’re all out of context and shape, and they don’t make sense, not straight away.  Sometimes they're going to happen to me, sometimes to other people.  I don't know which it is until it happens."  At the time he didn't explain that he's normally lucky, and if the vision applies directly to them, whatever he sees happens a couple of days later, long enough for him to have made some sense of it, but not long enough for him to have forgotten the details, like how to get out of the building the day before.</p><p>That was years ago, but Prophet’s never got up the courage to tell the others.  Prophet had hoped that the Guitarist knowing the truth, having known it for years, might make it easier to convince him about what will happen tomorrow, and that they need to cancel the mission because otherwise they all die.  Once he’d convince the Guitarist, Prophet had hoped that the Guitarist would help convince the others, because he's going to need the help.</p><p>Except it doesn't work that way.  The Guitarist looks at him, like he's grown a second head, and he's never looked like that at Prophet before, not even when the Guitarist first found out.  "It changes nothing."</p><p>The West Ryder Bank had a vault full of sheet music, because they were the central holding point for all music for the region. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, a van was coming to take it all to the incinerator, and once it’s in the van, they can’t get it back. If they don't stop the music being picked up this afternoon, so much will be lost forever. They can't even delay the mission to give Prophet more time to think of a way round it.</p><p>Prophet knows all that, but he still tries to convince the Guitarist to help him get everyone to drop it, but nothing Prophet says budges the Guitarist at all.</p><p>Maybe because it's different for him.  The rest of them, they can play something other than the guitar, but the Guitarist, it's all he knows, and guitars are the instruments most closely associated with all this death and violence.  The music ban means almost no one gets to hear any of them, but people not being able to hear the Guitarist play is a sin or a tragedy, Prophet doesn't know which.  Oh, how Prophet wished the entire world could hear the Guitarist play.  The band still play, of course, carefully unloaded instruments, but it's never sounds right, dual-purpose guitars, they don't sound the same.</p><p>The band was why Prophet, Longhair and Suit were in the US when it all kicked off. They were touring. It was really low rent, playing to crowds of fifty at most, and if someone was making money off it, it wasn't them. Their actual guitarist up and left them mid-way through, leaving them in desperate need of a guitarist, so they advertised for a replacement, an emergency message sent through the local musical grapevine. It must have worked, because in he walked, the Guitarist, coolest man in the building, possibly in the whole city, something they knew just from the way he looked and stood. He could play too, he picked up their songs after a couple of goes, even the one with the tricky solo that they'd argued about whether to keep in or not. The Guitarist was only supposed to be cover for a couple of nights, but he joined them, despite them admitting to the less-than-financially-successful nature of the tour, and he was with them when the news came over the radio.</p><p>At first, it was only guitars that were banned.  Some nonsense about how easy they were to convert into weapons, and how they weren't safe to be allowed.  Then someone realised that basses were that bit heavier, that bit stronger, and if you could convert guitars, then you could make something even more dangerous from a bass guitar.</p><p>Drums followed, and so on and so on, till it was clear it had all been a smoke-screen for banning music.  And people were going along with it, because the news was full of footage of how dangerous musical instruments were.</p><p>The tour had ground to a halt.  They would have gone home but they'd no money for plane tickets, what with their record company having gone bust, so they were busily finding odd jobs while they waited for the Embassy to sort them out.</p><p>They were in a bar, waiting, confused, worried, because the situation wasn't any better back home - the ban was worldwide, and they'd only ever wanted to be musicians.  It wasn't like they had any other skills to fall back on, hence the scraping by until they could get to England.  They'd had a couple of beers, not much, enough to make them slightly less careful than they should have been, so when there was a police raid, because there'd been a tip-off that there was (now illegal) sheet music on the premises, they'd grabbed the couple of boxes worth they knew was there, along with as many LPs as they could carry, and ran for it, followed by the sound of gunfire.</p><p>Somehow, they lost their pursuers.  It still left them holding a fair bit of contraband, which they hid in the van that had been their tour bus.  With the distinct fear that if they'd been identified, they'd be hunted down, they got in the van and left.</p><p>The next town was much the same, working odd jobs to make ends meet, but the second time, maybe trouble didn't find them, maybe they went looking for it.  Same the next time, and the time after that, and eventually they became known as the Music Bandits.</p><p>Sometimes they got recognised and it was bad, and they had to scarper, quickly, away from the police, and one time the coast guard, but sometimes, they got recognised and it was good.  There was a whole underground network of musicians and music fans, people willing to risk all kinds to save music.  Sometimes they put them up, sometimes they acted as guardians for the music and instruments they saved.</p><p>That was how they met Note, in the basement of a Baptist chapel, helping them hide fifty records from the police.  She came with them when they left that town.  "God gave me a voice, and I am gonna use it."</p><p>All that lead them here.</p><p>And it's going to lead them to their deaths unless Prophet can come up with a solution.</p><p>The Guitarist looked him in the eye, "we're not like you.  Every time we go on a raid, we don't know what's going to happen.  We go in, knowing we might not come out."  And that was the thing, the last thing that Prophet remembers from his dream, <i>that moment, where they're cornered, and they're the only two left, and the Guitarist closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and Prophet can tell that the first thought in the Guitarist's mind isn't how do they get the music out of there, which would make sense, or how do they get out of there, which would be reasonable, or even how to get out of there himself, to hell with Prophet, which would be understandable.  No, the Guitarist's first thought was how to get Prophet out of there, followed by a desperate throw of the sheet music at the police and a move to go out all guns blazing while Prophet escapes. </i>  The first shots rang out as Prophet woke up screaming.  He doesn't want any of them to die, but most especially, he doesn't want anyone dying for him.  He doesn't like the way the Guitarist put himself down as the most disposable.</p><p>It's not going to happen while Prophet has anything left.  He looks the Guitarist in the eye, tries to call on the myth of the all-powerful, always obeyed leader that the media has created.  "Okay.  Will you at least help me convince them I haven't gone mad when I tell them I see the future?"</p><p>"I can do that."</p><p>~~~~</p><p>They take it well, more annoyed that Prophet hasn't told them before than disturbed by his powers.  Suit takes it in his stride, of course, which you didn't need psychic powers to predict, thinking more about how they can use the information that worrying about details like 'how?'  Longhair is less help, "no, I can't see lottery numbers, plus, how'd we ever collect our winnings?" but it's mostly in jest.  Jokes are how Longhair deals with things and that's fine too.</p><p>What's not fine is that none of them want to call the raid off.</p><p>Prophet worries that it's because he's not been convincing enough.  He tries again, taking them through every horrible detail - the sound of bullets hitting flesh, their convulsions, the hopelessness of it all.</p><p>They still don't seem to get it, that if they go through with this, they will all die.  Note speaks for all of them when she says "okay, so you know what happens if we do what we planned.  How about we change what we planned?"  It gets Prophet's hopes up, that maybe they'll call it off.  "Where does it start to go wrong?" Note asks.  Looking back on it, that's where Prophet should have lied, but he's so relieved that they might have seen reason that he tells the truth.  It all goes wrong when the bank teller, a grandmotherly lady who probably bore them no specific ill-will, hits the alarm.</p><p>"So, we stop her hitting the alarm."  Note is determined to see this through.</p><p>None of them are willing to be talked out of it, not even when Prophet tries to argue that even if they change what they do, it might still all end the same way. They're going to go ahead with the raid. They offer to let Prophet sit it out, if he's so sure it'll end in disaster no matter what, but he can't. If there's something worse than being with them when it all happens, it would be not being with them.</p><p>It leaves Prophet in the here and now, late afternoon, moments before it all starts again.  He’s staring at the shimmering golden blinds in the window of the shoe shop as everyone moves into place for the raid.  He rubs his eyes, hoping to induce a vision, but it doesn't work.  He's never been able to make them happen to order, and he only has them when he's asleep.  He tried, after they changed the plan, to see if it helped at all or only made the situation worse, <i>nothing can be worse than his dream last night</i>, but he was too nervous to sleep naturally, and there wasn't enough time between morning and the late afternoon for him to take anything to make him sleep but still be awake, ready and alert enough for this.</p><p>He didn't start all this to be the sort of man who threatens grannies, but he can't see any other way of stopping her raising the alarm when the raid starts.  He can't see any other way of stopping their horrible, needless, deaths happening.  He can't see anything past the next ten minutes.  Whatever is going to happen, is going to happen.  The future is here.</p>
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